Philosophy of Teaching Statement- Kevin D. Donohue
PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING STATEMENT
Kevin D. Donohue
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Kentucky
March 15, 2006
My teaching assignment consists of undergraduate and graduate courses in the
electrical engineering department with specialty courses in the signals and systems area
(statistical signal processing, digital signal processing (DSP), and communication
systems). These courses emphasize:
 applying mathematical models for describing relationships between information
and signals,
 designing systems for generating and processing information bearing signals,
 solving related engineering problems in the application areas of control,
communications, and signal processing.
I believe students that ultimately become good engineers and make valuable
contributions to their profession and society are self learners. Therefore, as an instructor
I seek to challenge students to achieve what they think is just beyond their reach and
coach them in their efforts. While I work on betters ways to present information related
to basic knowledge and skill sets, I tend to put more effort into activities to develop
motivation and confidence. This includes activities such as telling stories that show the
importance of human creativity and initiative in significant engineering achievements,
and developing assignments where I can observe their problem solving and design skills
and give direct feedback. I also take advantage of students’ ability to teach and challenge
each other by using team activities.
My philosophy guides most of the activities I do as an instructor; however, in
practice my faith in students as self-learners is often shaken. Therefore, I am still trying
different approaches in teaching, and improving my story, project, and special problems
repertoire. In addition, I have implemented systematic methods for analyzing student
feedback and performance in my classes using self-assessments on the course outcomes,
overall performances on test problems and assignments. The following sections describe
more details on how I use student feedback in my course management and teaching
methods.
My classroom activities are strongly influenced by student feedback, which I get
directly from the students or through the official teacher/course evaluations administered
by the university. As a result of student feedback over the years, the characteristics of my
classroom are as follows. I give many quizzes throughout the course rather than a few
midterms. The quizzes are graded by me and are returned promptly with comments. I
assign, collect, and grade homework (homework assignments are graded by the teaching
assistant, if one is provided for the course). I give some projects and problems that
involve students working in groups, and I make class materials available on my web page
(see http://www.engr.uky.edu/~donohue/courses.html ). I do a lot of information
broadcasts using class email lists the college of engineering computing services set up for
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Philosophy of Teaching Statement- Kevin D. Donohue
me. Whenever possible, I make students orally present project results, or explain
homework solutions to the rest of the class. In regards to student presentations, I get
negative feedback primarily because students do not like to speak publicly and they don’t
like listening to a classmate who is doing a poor job at it. I try to minimize the pain of
the experience by moderating the event; however, I continue with student presentations
because I think it helps them in the long run. The most consistent complaint (feedback)
from industry about engineering students concerns poor communication skills. So I don’t
weigh in negative student comments enough to drop oral presentations from my
classroom activities yet.
In lab courses I emphasize experimental design skills and written explanations (how
to write and communicate technical information). Therefore, I try not to provide a lot of
detail in the lab assignment on how to make a measurement. I have them focus on
measurement principles and the main functions of the instrument. They are free to read
tutorials on the instrument and the manual (both of with are readily available). This
frustrates some students; however, rather than learning a particular instrument, I am
hopeful that they will learn instrumentation skills applicable to broader setting (and learn
how to read manual). I encourage writing more concisely through the use of figures,
graphs, and equations. I think by now most of my students see the value in developing
their writing skills and appear to be improving at it.
In order to determine how well students are achieving the course outcomes, I have
started a system (since Spring 1999) for grading each assignment according to the
outcomes listed for the course. If a single assignment has multiple outcomes, it will be
graded in separate components and recorded as separate components in the class
spreadsheet. So each column relates to the performance of one outcome. Scores are then
averaged over all students and a class grade assigned for each outcome. This way I can
track student outcome achievements vs. what I do in the classroom from semester to
semester. I keep track of change and student performance in a course through journaling
at the end and beginning of each semester. I assess student performance relative to the
course outcomes through several ways, including student self-assessments of outcome
achievement, as well as my assessments through assignments and tests. My teaching
portfolio includes a similar analysis for all the courses I have taught since 1998. Excerpts
from my teaching portfolio showing how I summarize data and make decisions for course
improvement are provided in the Supplemental Material section of this dossier.
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